


No Living Thing

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Autumn, Canon Compliant, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Halloween, Implied Bellamy/Clarke, S2-S3 Hiatus, Spooky, or my attempt at
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 13:09:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12558072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Camp Jaha, Post S2. Bellamy has a series of disquieting dreams.Very lightly implied Bellarke, not necessarily romantic.





	No Living Thing

**Author's Note:**

> This was written all in one go and only lightly edited because I felt like getting it out there this weekend, before Halloween. Apologies for any mistakes. I may go back and make further edits later.

Deep in the woods beneath an acidic-dun sky, the color of a chemical spill, surrounded by an endlessness of thin white birches, leafless and stick-limbed, all peeling bark, lost in the middle of a disorienting maze of trees, Bellamy takes a half-step back and his heel crunches down on a stray twig.

Snap—crack.

And the thing looks up. And right at him.

Its head is a long, white skull, pointed into a beak at the end or—like a strange animal—hard dull skeleton bone with two large empty sockets where its eyes should be and—

The skull sits atop a thin, still frame. The creature wears a black coat and black gloves and stands taller than Bellamy by a head or more but is utterly motionless. Except for the sharp, birdlike motion of his head a moment before, Bellamy might have assumed it was no living thing at all.

Perhaps it is no living thing at all.

Its head not skull or beak or bone but mask. A long gas mask with soulless round dark eyes and a midnight black canister where the mouth should be.

The head tilts to the side.

Considering.

Fog rolls in around their feet.

 

*

 

_Raven stands next to him, watching him watching the horizon. She leans heavily on her cane. She waits a long time to speak._

_"Are you going with them?"_

_He can't see the Mountain from here. But he's picturing it._

_"Leaving tomorrow when the sun comes up."  
_

_Leaving to bury the dead. His dead. Because no one would even think of asking the forty-two to go and because Clarke isn't here and because he needs to. If he doesn't, he can’t say how long they'll haunt him._

 

*

 

In the middle of a forest of verdant trees, overhanging branches heavy with mist, ground and tree trunks and forest-floor logs all overrun with thick disquieting moss and a humidity that clogs up the lungs and bathes the skin, Bellamy watches for movement. And finds it.

A tattered spacesuit figure, wafting, spacewalking through the spaces in the leaves. It disturbs the far distance.

It approaches. Slowly.

Closer, Bellamy can see that the suit is rotted, ugly with blight and decay. Patches of black mold at the elbows, fuzzy off-green the color of moss on its legs.

Bounding forward, behind a tree, gone. Visible again. Tethered, to what he cannot see.

Closer and it reaches for its helmet, pulls it off and beneath—

Nothing—

 

*

 

_Outside Alpha Station a large pile of wreckage is growing. Octavia and Monty haul armfuls of debris from the trashed inside rooms. Some of it salvageable. Some not._

_Scavenging parties are forming: for the dropship, for Factory, for Mecha. For Mount Weather. His stomach in ruins, his fists closing around air. They are become experts at remaking what has been destroyed._

 

*

 

Surrounded by towering pines, stifling pines that lean in close and creak from a wind too high in the heavens to feel, Bellamy listens. Around him the shuffling of pine needles and the swaying of branches and below an uncertainty in the Earth. Something in the distance is calling. But the trees are too thick and too close and too many and he can feel the brush of them against his arms. As if with his own movement.

He tries to stay still, leans forward only, ears alert, listening.

In the far distance a murmur, a whisper. Low and longing. Multiplying on itself, voices, messages he can't discern, secrets.

Secrets, growing. Rumors, judgements.

And laughter. A trill of laughter upwards, reaching up higher even than the tops of the trees…

 

*

 

_Lincoln is sitting by the Alpha Station door, coloring a forest with his fingertips, handmade plant and berry paints by his side._

_"Yellow trees," Bellamy says, and he startles.  
_

_Then turns back to his work, slightly smiling._

_"Mmmm...you didn't see the trees changing color? Or you never got the chance to notice?"_

_He didn't even know—except what his Ark books told him._

_Except what he remembers, from a time so long gone the memory is no more than a ghost-mumble in his ear. An ancestral life._

_He steps from the doorway and into the dirt._

 

*

 

A blooming sea of yellow leaves, a flurry of tiny bright leaves, a wave of movement in a light and lilting breeze. The sky a clear and cloudless pale blue.

He is standing deep in the ground, looking up.

He is holding his breath, waiting.

For a moment, he's sure he sees, just a flash, just a hint: she's running and her hair trails loose and gold in her wake.

Running toward him or away he does not know.

He steps forward, dizzy.

When he wakes he'll remember only a single image, a sharp bright flash, but it fades farther and weaker with every beat of his pulse in his throat. Beyond the old metal walls of his room, spring is blooming. But in his ears the dying breaths of autumn linger.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always greatly appreciated.
> 
> I'm also on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/).


End file.
